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Monthly Archives: November 2003

I’ve spent a lot of time and effort since 1997 developing effective propaganda tactics for
reaching the business world on behalf of the hacker community — among other things, by
popularizing the term ‘open source’. If you want to grok how this is done, read
my October 15 interview with a bunch of Prudential Securities investors.

Pay attention to style as well as content. This is the language you have to learn to speak
to reach the people who write big checks. It’s not very complicated, if you just bear in mind
that these people are obsessed with two things: risk management and return on investment. As they should be — it’s their job.

“Free Love”, eh? Well, that would explain a lot. Jack must have been the dude I saw
damn near run into a doorframe yesterday because he was checking out my wife Cathy so intently he forgot to watch where he
was going. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

To clarify, while I believe natural selection explains a lot I have
caveats about IQ as a tool for testing intelligence. If you can’t
measure the coast of France with a single number how can you do it
with human intelligence?

Easily. Human intelligence is a great deal less complex than the
coast of France. :-)

It’s fashionable nowadays to believe that intelligence is some
complicated multifactor thing that can’t be captured in one number.
However, one of the best-established facts in psychometry (the science
of measuring mind) is that it is quite difficult to write a test of
mental ability that is not at least 50% correlated with all other such
tests. Or, to put it another way, no matter how you design ten tests for
mental ability, at least about half the variance in the scores for any one
of them statistically appears to be due to a “general intelligence”
that shows up on the other nine tests as well.

Psychometricians call this general intelligence measure “g”. It
turns out to predict important real-world success measures quite well
— not just performance in school but income and job success as
well. The fundamental weakness in multiple-factor theories of intelligence
is that measures of intelligence other than g appear to predict
very little about real-world outcomes. So you can call a lot of other
things “intelligence” if you want to make people feel warm and fuzzy,
but doing so simply isn’t very useful in the real world.

Some multifactor theorists, for example, like to describe accurate
proprioception (an acute sense of body position and balance) as a kind
of intelligence. Let’s say we call this “p”. The trouble with this
is that there are very few situations in which a combination of high p
and low g is actually useful — people need to be able to balance
checkbooks more often than they need to walk high wires. Furthermore,
g is easier to substitute for p than the other way around; a person
with high g but low p can think up a way to not have to walk a high
wire far better than a person with low g but high p can think up a way
not to have to balance a checkbook. So g is in a strict functional
sense more powerful than p. Similar arguments apply to most of the
other kinds of specialized non-g ‘intelligence’ that have been
proposed.

Once you know about g, you can rank mental-capability tests by
how well their score correlates with g. IQ is valuable because a
well-composed IQ test measures g quite effectively. For purposes
of non-technical discussion, g and IQ can be considered the same, and
pychometricians now accept that an IQ test which does not closely track
g is defective.

A lot of ink has been spent by people who aren’t psychometricians
on insisting that g is a meaningless statistical artifact. The most
famous polemic on this topic was Stephen Jay Gould’s 1981 bookThe Mismeasure of Man, a book which was muddled,
wrong, and in some respects rather dishonest. Gould was a
believing Marxist; his detestation of g was part of what he perceived
as a vitally important left-versus right kulturkampf. It is
very unfortunate that he was such a persuasive writer.

Unfortunately for Gould, g is no statistical phantom. Recently g
and IQ have been shown to correlate with measurable physiological
variables such as the level of trace zinc in your hair and performance
on various sorts of reaction-time tests. There are hints in the
recent literature that g may be largely a measure of the default level
of a particular neurotransmitter associated with states of mental
alertness and speed of thought; it appears that calling people of
subnormal intelligence “slow” may not be just a metaphor!

IQ is one of several large science-related issues on which
political bias in the dominant media culture has lead it to present as
fact a distorted or even reversed version of the actual science. In
1994, after Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve got a
thoroughly undeserved trashing, fifty leading psychometricians and
psychologists co-signed a summary of mainstream
science on intelligence. It makes eye-opening reading.

The reasons many popular and journalistic accounts continue to
insist that IQ testing is at best meaningless and at worst a sinister
plot are twofold. First, this belief flatters half of the population.
“My IQ may be below average, but that doesn’t matter because IQ is
meaningless and I have high emotional intelligence!” is,
understandably, a favorite evasion maneuver among dimwits. But that
isn’t the worst of it. The real dynamite is not in
individual differences but rather that the distribution of IQ (and
hence of g) varies considerably across groups in ways that are
politically explosive.

Men vs. women is the least of it. With other variables controlled,
men and women in a population have the same mean IQ, but the
dispersion differs. The female bell curve is slightly narrower, so
women have fewer idiots and fewer geniuses among them. Where this
gets touchy is that it may do a better job than cultural sexism of
explaining why most of the highest achievers in most fields are male
rather than female. Equal opportunity does not guarantee equal
results, and lot of feminist theory goes out the window.

But male/female differences are insignificant compared to the real
hot potato: differences in the mean IQ of racial and ethnic groups.
These differences are real and they are large enough to have severe
impact in the real world. In previous blog entries I’ve mentioned the
one-standard-deviation advantage of Ashkenazic Jews over gentile
whites; that’s roughly fifteen points of IQ. Pacific-rim Asians
(Chinese, Japanese, Koreans etc.) are also brighter on average by a
comparable margin. So, oddly enough, are ethnic Scots — though
not their close kin the Irish. Go figure…

And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist
bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard
deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. And
it gets worse: the average IQ of African blacks is lower
still, not far above what is considered the threshold of mental
retardation in the U.S. And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about
85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards
the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather
than nurturance effects.

For anyone who believe that racial equality is an important goal,
this is absolutely horrible news. Which is why a lot of
well-intentioned people refuse to look at these facts, and will
attempt to shout down anyone who speaks them in public. There have
been several occasions on which leading psychometricians have had
their books canceled or withdrawn by publishers who found the actual
scientific evidence about IQ so appalling that they refused to print
it.

Unfortunately, denial of the facts doesn’t make them go away. Far from
being meaningless, IQ may be the single most important statistic about
human beings, in the precise sense that differences in g probably drive
individual and social outcomes more than any other single measurable
attribute of human beings.

Mean IQ differences do not justify making assumptions about any individual.
There are African black geniuses and Ashkenazic Jewish morons; humanity and
ethics demand that we meet each individual human being as an individual,
without prejudice. At the same time, group differences have a significance
too great to ignore. In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but
commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is
unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the
general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact
independent of skin color.

And that is actually a valuable hint about how to get beyond
racism. A black man with an IQ of 85 and a white man with an IQ of 85
are about equally likely to have the character traits of poor impulse
control and violent behavior associated with criminality — and
both are far more likely to have them than a white or black man with
an IQ of 110. If we could stop being afraid of IQ and face up to it,
that would give us an objective standard that would banish racism per
se. IQ matters so much more than skin color that if we started paying
serious attention to the former, we might be able to stop paying
attention to the latter.

In fact, this strip is incorrect. I did not coin the term “open source”;
I only popularized it. It was coined by
my friend Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute. While it’s true that I more or less ran the brainstorming session and fortunately had enough of a clue to recognize a winner when it popped up, the creative leap was all hers.

Mike Smith relays an interesting possible explanation for the observed
statistical fact that American and European Jews have a mean IQ a
standard deviation higher than Caucasian gentiles:

During the period from ancient times to modern times, there was a
constant phenomenon of Jews converting to Christianity (there were
many social pressures to do so). In a nutshell, the idea is that the
lower-IQ Jews were statistically more likely to convert, as it freed
them from having to learn to read Torah. During the Middle Ages, it
was not worth the effort for most people to become literate; the
payback was not worth it. Books were rare and expensive, and learning
to read was no guarantee of getting ahead in life. Of course, people
like to do what they’re especially good at, and the higher-IQ’s among
the Jews did not find learning to read to be such a burden. As such,
they were statistically less likely to convert (and statistically more
likely to become fathers of many children in a culture that valued
intelligence.) It is worth noting that in ancient times, Jews were not
stereotyped as especially intelligent; that stereotype arose in the
Middle Ages.

This is a special case of one of my favorite Damned Ideas, originally
developed by John W. Campbell in the 1960s from some speculations
by a forgotten French anthropologist. Campbell proposed that the
manhood initiation rituals found in many primitive tribes are a
selective machine designed to permit adulthood and reproduction only
to those who can demonstrate verbal fluency and the ability to override
instinctive fears on verbal command.

Campbell suggests that all living humans are descended from groups
of hominids that, having evolved full-human mental capability in some
of their members, found the overhead of supporting the dullards too
high. So they began selecting for traits correlated with intelligence
through initiation rituals timed for just as their offspring were
achieving reproductive capacity; losers got driven out, or possibly
killed and eaten.

Campbell pointed out that the common elements of tribal initiations
are (a) scarring or cicatricing of the skin, opening the way for
lethal infections, (b) alteration or mutilation of the genitals,
threatening the ability to reproduce, and (b) alteration of the mouth
and teeth, threatening the ability to eat. These seem particularly
well optimized for inducing maximum instinctive fear in the subject
while actually being relatively safe under controlled and relatively
hygenic conditions. The core test of initiation is this: can the
subject conquer fear and submit to the initiation on the basis
of learned (verbal, in preliterate societies) command?

Campbell noticed the first order effect was to shift the mean of
the IQ bell curve upwards over generations. The second-order effect,
which if he noticed he didn’t talk about, was to start an arms race in
initiation rituals; competing bands experimented with different
selective filters (not consciously but through random variation).
Setting the bar too low or too high would create a bad tradeoff
between IQ selectivity and maintaining raw reproductive capacity. So
we’re descended from the hominids who found the right tradeoff to push
their mean IQ up as rapidly as possible and outcompeted the groups
that chose less well.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Campbell or his sources, but
this theory explains why initiation rituals for girls are a rare and
usually post-literate phenomenon. Male reproductive capacity is
cheap; a healthy young man can impregnate several young women a day,
and healthy young men are instinct-wired to do exactly that whenever
they can get away with it. Female reproductive capacity, on
the other hand, is scarce and precious. So it makes sense to select
the boys ruthlessly and give the girls a pass. Of course if you push
this too far you don’t get enough hunters and fighters, but the right
tradeoff pretty clearly is not 1-to-1.

(This would also explain why humans are designed for mild polygyny,
1 to 3 sexual partners per male. You can spot this by looking at
where human beings are on various physical characteristics that
correlate with degree of polygyny in other primates — disparity in
average size between males and females, for example, is strongly
correlated with it.)

What Campbell did notice is that this theory of selection
by initiation would neatly explain one of the mysteries of human
paleoanthropology — how human beings got so smart so fast. The
differences between H. Erectus and H. Sapiens are not large in
absolute genetic terms (they can’t be, we share over 94% of our genome
with chimps) but they’re hard to credit given normal rates of
morphological change in mammals and only two million years to work
in. Something must have been putting hominids under
abnormally strong selective pressure — and Campbell’s idea
is that we did it to ourselves!

Now, I’m not sure I believe Jews bootstrapping themselves up a
whole standard deviation in less than 2000 years, but if you apply
a similar idea to a longer timeframe it begins to look pretty
reasonable. (And Campbell did suggest that the Jewish practice of
infant circumcision had originally been a manhood rite.)

Within my lifetime, I expect we’re going to have the ability to do
germ-line enhancement of human intelligence. I strongly suspect that that
will set off another arms race — because cultures that suppress
that technology will be once again doomed against cultures that do. And
this time, we’re smart enough to know that in advance…

Uh-oh. I see another identity-politics double-bind coming. Eugene Volokh comments on the anti-semitic canard that Jews were disproportionally influential in the development of Communism. The sides in this kind of dispute are very predictable. One one hand, the anti-Semites, a disgusting crew of racist troglodytes with evil motives. On the other, the good-hearted and right-thinking people in the world exclaiming in horror at the very thought that anyone might say anything veering so close to the classic tropes of anti-Semitic propaganda. (And I am not being the least bit ironic in either description, not this time.)

Unfortunately, the awkward thing about this particular canard is that it happens to be true. And that illustrates a serious problem, an inability to cope that most historians have acquired when questions of history go too near certain forbidden topics and modes of inquiry.

As Eugene Volokh’s sources note, a disproportionately large number of the original Bolsheviks were Jewish. Karl Marx was ethnically Jewish, though his parents had converted to Christianity. It is impossible to study the history of Marxism, Socialism, and Communism without noticing how many Jewish names crop up among the leading intellectuals. It is equally impossible not to notice how many of the Old Left families in the U.S. were (and still are) Jewish — and, more specifically, Ashkenazim of German or Eastern European extraction. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg didn’t come out of nowhere.

It’s not even very hard to understand why this is. There is a pattern, going back to Spinoza in the 1600s, of Jewish intellectuals seeking out the leading edge of certain kinds of reform movements. Broadly speaking, if you look at any social movement of the last 300 years that was secular, rationalist, and communitarian, somewhere in it you would find nonobservant Jews providing a lot of the intellectual firepower and organizational skills. Often a disproportionate share, relative to other population groups.

Communism was one example; there are many others. One of my favorites is the Ethical Culture movement. Today, we have the Free Software movement, not coincidentally founded by Jewish atheist Richard Stallman. There is an undeniable similarity among all these movements, an elusive deep
structure having to do not so much with shared beliefs as a shared style of believing that one might call messianic social rationalism.

Anybody who thinks I’m arguing for a conspiracy theory should check their meds. No, there is something much simpler and subtler at work here. Inherited religious myths, even when they no longer have normative force, influence the language and conceptual frameworks that intellectuals use to approach other issues. The mythologist Joseph Campbell once noted that thinkers with a Catholic background like mine gravitate towards universalizing mysticisms and Protestants towards individualist redemptionism; he could have added that thinkers with a Jewish heritage tend to love messianic social doctrines. (One can cite exceptions to all three, of course, but the correlation will still be there after you’ve done so.)

Thus, assimilated Jews have a particular propensity for constructing secular messianisms — or for elaborating and intellectualizing secular messianisms invented by gentiles. But you can’t say this sort of thing in academia; you get called a racist if you do. And you especially aren’t allowed to notice the other reason movements like Communism sometime look not unlike Jewish conspiracies — which is that the IQ bell curve for Jews has a mean about a standard deviation north of the IQ bell curve for Caucasian gentiles.

In cold and sober truth, in any kind of organization where intelligence matters — even the Communist movement —, you are going to find a disproportionate number of Jews with their hands on the levers. It doesn’t take any conspiracy to arrange this, and it’s not the Jews’ fault the goyim around them are such narrs (Yiddish
for “imbeciles”). It just happens.

But only people like me who don’t give a shit about being castigated for political incorrectness are willing to even whisper these things. Because that’s true, anti-anti-Semites can’t counter anti-Semitic muck-spreading with the truth; instead, they have to pretend that none of the historical patterns around which anti-Semites have constructed
their paranoid delusions have any basis in fact at all.

This is denial, and leaves the good guys in a damn weak position against anti-Semitic racists, who by distorting the record only a little can not only feel they have the truth on their side, but in some nontrivial ways actually be justified in that belief.

Unlike the anti-Semites, I mostly like the cultural traits that led so many Jewish intellectuals to Communism — including one I haven’t mentioned yet, the urge to transcend ethnic tribalism
and order the world according to a Law. But if the road to a Christian hell is paved with good individual intentions, the road to totalitarian hell is paved with communitarian idealism. It’s a tragedy that in Communism Jewish idealism, messianism, and intellectualism nourished a monster that turned on the Jews and killed so many of them.

If the discussion didn’t violate so many taboos, mainstream scholars could start asking even more interesting questions. Like: exactly how and why did thinkers raised in the relatively gentle communitarianism of the Jewish tradition become apologists for the vicious collectivism of Marxism and all its toxic children? And what can we do to keep the like from happening again, to Jews or anyone else?

But these questions probably won’t get seriously asked in my lifetime. Because political correctness has made us afraid to notice that, in some ways, the Jews really have had a special, shaping influence on the reform politics of the modern era, including Communism. About that much, the anti-Semites are right.

Steve’s point complements Kim’s and amplifies it in some useful
ways. Nobody wants to go back to the days when women were treated as
chattels or second-class citizens. Anyway, attempts to do so would be
doomed for reasons not so much moral as economic; societies that
suppress the productivity and intelligence of 50% of their members are
inevitably going to lose out to societies that don’t. But what Steve and
Kim have pointed out is that Western society often has pursued the
worthy goal of equality in a way that is hamfisted and destructive,
because it tries to remake human nature rather than acknowledging and
working with it.

These essays address two specific problems we’ve been saddled with;
Kim’s with the attack on masculinity, and Steve’s with the attack on
femininity. Among white anglos (especially bicoastal
“progressive” white anglos), it is no longer respectable
for a male person to behave like a man and a female person to behave
like a woman.

In fact, in today’s bien-pensant circles, one can be attacked as a
sexist for suggesting that the phrase “like a man” or
“like a woman” has any meaning at all. Many of us have
become obscurely terrified of sexual dimorphism, apparently out of
fear that acknowledging it will bring back the bad old days.

This kind of attitude has done more damage than most people
realize. Read those essays. There’s something gone badly wrong when
normal boys are dosed with Ritalin for being normally loud and
aggressive, and only strippers have the privilege of hugging a man
they like while at work.

I think our culture will recover from this. Beginning in the
1950s, portions of the kibbutz movement in Israel made the most
fervent try yet at erasing sex differences — they raised kids
in creches and tried to systematically stamp out sex-differentiated
behaviors. They failed; the children of the first generation, despite
intense socialization, gravitated back to traditional sex roles.

We’ll all be happier when we relax enough to acknowledge that
although equality before the law is something every human deserves,
some things naturally fall in men’s country and some in women’s
country — and the fact that minorities of men and women behave
in gender-atypical ways doesn’t change that reality. There will never
be more female soldiers or policemen than male ones, and never more
male nurses and child-rearers than female ones. Men are going to
groove on power tools and women are going to coo at babies; that’s
just the way it is. down to our DNA. Behavioral dimorphism is wired
into us for good reasons that have everything to do with Darwin and
nothing to do with political correctness.

The first stage of recovery is recognizing that there’s a problem
— that men and women find each others’ behavioral as well as
physical sex differences attractive, and that neither men nor women
are well served by efforts to cram us all into a unisex box. My wife
once observed, on behalf of a billion sisters, “What good is a man if
you cut off his balls?” — and she was talking everyday behavior,
not just anatomy or sexual function. There aren’t a lot of men who
will seek out the company of defeminized women if they have a choice
in the matter, either.

That is where essays like Kim’s and Steve’s can help. By waking us up
and pissing us off, they remind us that our sex-linked behaviors and
our preferences for sex-linked behaviors in others actuallymatter, that they’re every bit as much a part of our normal
human makeup as having penises or vaginas. People who want us to
forget this for ideological reasons are objectively inhumane.

I got email from Dr. Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog,
about an hour ago. The bad news was, he turned down the short story. The
good news was he accepted the fact article.

I’m going to be published in Analog!

/me does geeky victory dance

OK, so this is one of those things where if you don’t immediately
get why it’s wicked cool, no amount of explanation is likely to
enlighten you. I’ll just say I’ve been a science-fiction fan
for 35 years and Analog has always been the banner-bearer
for my kind of SF, the stuff with the rivets in it. I’ve wanted to
get published there when I grew up ever since I was 11 years old;
this is literally a childhood dream come true.

The CSS designer for WordPress, the successor to the
b2 engine that I may be upgrading to shortly, responded to my previous
rant. In a generally thoughtful and responsive post, he said “But
even if [pixel sizes] are defined for fonts, does your browser not let
you easily resize this?”.

This, I’m afraid, is CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell.

In particular, I should not have to do an explicit operation every
time to get the font sizes I want. In general, answers of the form
“you can override the designer’s preferences by jumping through hoops”
show the wrong attitude. This attitude clashes with the objective
reality of lots of different display devices out there.

It’s also bad human-factors engineering. As the user, my preferences
should be primary — in font sizes as in all other things. That’s
how the Web is supposed to work, and CSS and web designers who don’t
get this are doing users a major disservice in order to gratify their
own egos.

Ultimately they’re shooting themselves in the foot, too — think about
what will happen over time as display sizes both average larger and
the size dispersion increases (e.g. cell phones and PDAs get WiFi at
the same time desktop displays go to 1600×1200 and higher).
Fixed-size fonts, in farticular, are going to be a bigger and bigger
lose as time goes on.

To the extent you think of yourself as a servant of the user, rather
than an artist whose job it is to make things pretty, that’s when your
designs will have real and lasting value. This is a hard lesson for
artists to learn, but it’s the only way to avoid filling the web with
designs that are gaudy, wearisome, and lose their utility as display
technology improves and becomes more various.

People who put absolute pixel sizes in CSS layouts should be lashed
with knouts. I’ve tripped over this problem yet again while moving my
blog; I’m using b2, and the default
stylesheet shipped with it was obviously produced by some graphics
designer who has failed to grasp the fact that there are lots of
different display sizes and resolutions out there.

OK, for those of you who don’t see the problem here, it goes like this.
Graphic designer composes his layout on a 1024×768 display. To make the
spacing come out all pretty, he specifies a 10 or 11-pixel font which looks
good on that 72-dot-per-inch display. Now I view it on my 1920×1440 display
at over 120dpi resolution — and the font is 40% smaller and a hell of
a strain to read. There are many other, related errors as well, like
specifying absolute box or table widths when percentage of screen width
would be more appropriate.

The basic error here is overcontrolling the layout rather than
letting the user’s browser choose it in execution of the user’s
preferences. Graphics designers are chronically prone to thinking of
a browser as a device for delivering pixels, rather than information.
But it doesn’t have to be this way — and, in fact, HTML isn’t
supposed to be. You can make your CSS scale to the user’s chosen font
size by specifying box dimensions in units of em, en and ex (which are
evaluated relative to the parent box’s current font size) rather than
pixels. But most CSS designers are apparently either too freaking
incompetent to do this or just don’t give a rat’s ass about
display-independence or the user’s preferences to begin with.

This sorry state of affairs is one of the better arguments for the
proposition, widely shared among my peers, that graphics designers
are basically a bunch of dope-smoking ponytailed
dimwits who need to be smacked upside the head on a regular basis and
not let anywhere near a software or web design without strict adult
supervision by a cluebat-wielding programmer.

Another stupid graphic-designer stunt is changing the colors on
visited and unvisited hotlinks away from the browser defaults (it’s especially bad when they’re mapped to the same color). What make this annoying is that it
discards an important visual cue for web page users by making it less
obvious where the hotlinks are. People who do this should be clubbed
with a chair leg until they stop.

Sigh. Here’s the default b2
stylesheet and here is the stylesheet I
use. Notice how much simpler mine is? The more you default
rendering decisions to the browser like Ghod and Tim Berners-Lee
intended, the more error-prone crap your stylesheets can omit, the
faster your pages will render, and the better the user experience
will be.

UPDATE: A reader tells me that part of this is the browser vendors’
fault. It seems that on older browsers, only pixel sizes worked
reliably. He says this has long since been fixed but the damage to
CSS designers’ minds was already done. Another reader pointed me to a
good rant on this topic by Jamie Zawinski.

I’ve had a copy of David Frum’s Dead Right sitting on my coffee table for months. I didn’t buy it, it was landed on my by an old friend who persists in imagining that I’m interested in reading conservative political theory. In fact, it’s been years since I found conservative theorizing other than wearily predictable. and it would have been a lot more years if I hadn’t been unaccountably late in grasping Russell Kirk’s argument for the organic wisdom of institutions.

John Holbo’s smackdown gives form to all the inchoate reasons I didn’t want to face Frum’s book. Holbo, by his own account, goes looking for a unifying philosophy of conservative thought and finds only an attitude, an aesthetic, a hankering for people and situations to possess certain qualities without a logically or ethically coherent theory of why those qualities would be desirable. Holbo makes much of Frum’s yearning that people should be tough, self-reliant, and self-disciplined and Frum’s apparent willingness that the order of society should punish slackness, even if that is not necessarily the most economically efficient way to arrange things.

Holbo admits that he is loading onto Frum views that Frum would probably deny. But his argument that those views are logical extensions of positions Frum and other conservatives do hold seems basically fair, and so does his charge that Frum-like conservatism is an incoherent mishmash of emotional desires masquerading (not very convincingly) as a political philosophy.

What I am left wondering is why Holbo expected conservatives to have an actual theory in the first place. Or whether he actually expected it at all — his purported surprise and disappointment smells a bit disingenuous to me, a bit like a rhetorical flourish we’re not really expected to believe. Did he really give no thought beforehand to the implication of the label that conservatives use for themselves?

The word conservative is an adjectival noun formed from the verb ‘to conservate’ — to keep something from decaying, to hold it static, to preserve it. Almost all of the core attitudes of conservatism unfold from that definition. Almost all of conservatism is a set of rationalizations for a gut-level inclination to see any sort of change as a threat. Conservatism is the politics of dread, of people who are god-fearing, change-fearing, and
future-fearing.

I say ‘almost all’ because, by historical accident, conservatism has got itself tangled up with impulses of a very different kind — specifically classical-liberal and libertarian ones. Many people who describe themselves as conservatives are in fact nothing of the kind — they are in bed with conservatism only out of a shared loathing of the Marxist/socialist left. The alliance depends on a sort of folie a deux — conservatives fooling themselves that free markets tend to freeze existing power relationships in place, and classical-liberals fooling themselves that freedom can be reconciled with the love of hierarchy and punishment wired into the conservative hindbrain.

The parts of ‘conservative’ theory that actually deserve to be called theory are usually classical-liberal or libertarian intrusions. Nor is this anything new; before being shotgun-wedded to classical liberalism by the threat of Marxism around the beginning of the 20th century, conservatives imported their theory from Aquinas or Plato or Calvin.

In fact, when you get down to trying, it is remarkably hard to name anybody who has done a systematic job of deriving conservative politics from a theory about the nature of good. Especially since the Enlightenment, conservative thinkers have tended to be critics rather than theory-builders, and in fact have tended to distrust theory. Edmund Burke, for example, wasn’t a philosopher so much as he was a critical aphorist. In our own day, Willam F. Buckley has been a similar exemplar of the conservative public intellectual — witty
and devastatingly accurate about the failures and hypocrisies of his opponents, but neither capable of nor interested in producing an entire philosophy of right action or right government.

Russell Kirk is interesting precisely because he bucked this trend to some extent. His idea that the forms of institutions embody an unconscious wisdom about what tends to produce good outcomes is that rarest of things, an argument for conservatism that is not circularly bound to conservative, authoritarian, or religious assumptions.

It’s not enough, though. It isn’t sufficient to justify all the normative things Frum and mainstream conservatives want; you can’t get opposition to cloning stem cells out of it, for example. Nor does it stand comparison with the elaborate theoretical edifices produced bythe Left. The core assumptions of Marxist theory were false-to-fact and its results horrible, but there was a sort of system and logic in between that conservative thinking never really had.

Left-liberals have no room for glee or schadenfreude at conservative expense, though; their position is no better. Having been shown the hard way that Hayek was right and there is no alternative to the market, modern left-liberalism too is essentially a bunch of sentiments and attitudes rather than a philosophy. The practical politics of the left has become little more than a defensive huddle around welfare-state institutions everybody knows are headed for insolvency and collapse, and left attitudes increasingly amount to little more than being against whatever they think conservatives are for.

The inability to frame a positive philosophy is a serious problem for both groups. It reduces their politics to a series of gut rumbles and their conversation to increasingly enraged screaming straight from the hypothalamus (vide Michael Moore and Ann Coulter). A rational debate is hard to have when there isn’t any theory to frame and moderate emotional fixations. Or, as Goethe put it, the sleep of reason begets monsters.

A reader, responding to the suggestion that we call the Baathist
holdouts in Iraq
werewolves, asked rhetorically whether the intent was to dehumanize
them. Lurking behind this question was the theory that war supporters
like me need to make our enemies into un-persons in order to justify
continuing to kill them.

This question displays a kind of self-absorption by a person who
cannot really imagine a moral stance different from his/her own. In
such tender-minded thinking, the world is neatly divided into humans
that one must treat pretty much as though they were one’s next-door neighbor,
and non-humans who are not part of the moral community. The possibility
that a human being could be outside the moral community is essentially
ignored.

But there are human beings who are outside the moral community by nature.
We call them psychopaths. They lack the wiring for empathy and reciprocity
that makes it possible for most human beings to cooperate; they can (and
often do) commit sickening atrocities for pleasure. Fortunately, most
psychopaths have other kinds of neurological deficits as well and are
therefore not very bright.

Some people who probably were not born with psychopathy make themselves
into psychopaths. Consider, as a relevant example, Saddam Hussein and
his sons. They fed living people into shredders for amusement. No semantic
debate over whether that sort of monster is “human” or “dehumanized”
is going to change my judgment that that it deserves a violent
death as quickly as that result can be arranged.

The Baathist holdouts in Iraq are the hench-monsters of the
Husseins — the men who tore infants’ eyes out and strapped women
to tables in rape rooms. Calling them “werewolves” or “orcs” is not
an attempt to dehumanize them; that would be pointless, since they
have already dehumanized themselves.

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and
terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It’s time for a bit
of meme-hacking. Let’s see if we can displace terms like “insurgent”
or “Saddam loyalist” with one that conveys the true depth of evil we
are facing. I have a candidate to propose.

A little more than sixty years ago, the U.S. and its allies went to
war another psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator — Adolf
Hitler. In 1944, as the Third Reich was collapsing, the SS organized
a Nazi resistance to commit assassinations, sabotage and guerrilla
warfare behind Allied lines. The parallels in organization and
tactics with Baathist-holdout activity in Iraq are very
close.

It is a matter of record from Saddam Hussein’s autobiography that
he admired Hitler’s ruthless efficiency and sought to emulate it. We
should revive for these remnant Baathist thugs the term, redolent of
willful evil and darkness, that the Nazi resistance fighters used for
themselves.

beating yesterday — a worse one, I think, than it has really
assimilated. The Pew Research Center has analyzed
the results. If you guys don’t want your butts handed to you in 2004,
I have a few suggestions.

First, a reminder for new readers or old readers in any doubt. I
am not a Republican. I am not a conservative. There are some people
who are going to think my giving advice to the Democratic Party is
disingenuous or some form of point-scoring. They’re wrong. Politics
is an intrinsically evil game, but it might become at least less evil
if the Democrats cleaned up their act. I’d like to see that.

The most important message the voters delivered yesterday is thatrunning against George Bush is a fast road to failure. Where
Republican candidates successfully tied themselves to national issues and
ran on a boost-Bush platform (as in Kentucky and Mississippi) they won.
Only where the Democrats were able to divert attention to local issues
(like the FBI bug in Philadelphia Mayor Street’s office) did they
succeeed.

U.S. troops out of Iraq? Jobless recovery? War for oil? Tax
cuts? Halliburton? All these favored taglines of the anti-Bush crowd
got no traction at all. Zero. Zip. Nada. There is no evidence that
they helped and some inferential evidence in the poll numbers that
they hurt. The Democratic incumbant in Mississippi knew this was
a’comin’ — he actually worked at keeping Bill Clinton and the
whole gaggle of Democratic presidential candidates out of his state.
This didn’t save him.

This has direct implications for 2004. The way the regional
arithmetic of the Electoral College works makes it effectively
impossible to take the White House without a strong showing in
the South. If the 2004 elections were held today, Bush couldn’t
lose — and the trends favor Republican gains in the next
year.

So. What can the Democrats do to win?

Support the war.

The U.S. is at war. We will continue to be at war until there is
no credible threat from an alliance of WMD-wielding rogue states and
the Islamist terror network. The American people have accepted this,
and they will back George Bush’s war policy unless or until it appears
that he cannot competently execute it. Arguing that we should not
have a war policy, or should have a less ‘unilateral’ one,
just lost the Democrats two governorships and will almost certainly
lose them a third in Lousiana on 15 Nov.

Stop trying to personalize the 2004 campaign.

The only loser bigger than running gainst Bush’s war policy is
running against Bush himself. The Bush-is-Hitler/Bush-is-a-moron thing
has no zorch anywhere outside a set of bicoastal Brie-nibbler
patches and university campuses that can be counted on one hand.
The American people like and respect Bush, even when they question his
policies. (I find this part difficult to understand myself, but the
evidence is undeniable.)

Actively support gun rights.

Of all the single-issue blocs, gun owners are both the largest and
would probably the easiest to pry loose from the Republican base
(remember, Bill Clinton himself said gun control swung the last
election cycle). Over 50% of American households own guns and their
demographics cross over many narrower political classifications. A
lot of swing voters like me simply will not vote for any Democrat
without an actively pro-Second-Amendment record, but will give
Republicans the benefit of the doubt on this issue. If you want us
back, dump the gun-grabbers overboard.

Drop the prescription-drug entitlement.

I pick on this one because there is just now no more obvious
example of domestic-policy fecklessness. The American people said no
to single-payer health care ten years ago. If you think they can’t
spot a multi-billion-doller Medicare boondoggle in the making, you’re
fooling yourself. Passing this turkey will bring no credit on either
the Democrats or Republicans supporting it. Let it die.

Give us some presidential candidates who aren’t jokes

I look at the Nine Dwarves and the first thing reaction that comes
to mind isn’t even disgust but a sort of weary incredulity. I think
of P.J. O’Rourke’s line: “What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking
fuck?” A major party in the wealthiest, most powerful, fourth most
populous nation in the world can’t do any better than these?

I think I have a lot of company in judging that these guys looked
better six months ago, before they cheapened themselves with their
endless indistinguishable yapping and their blatant pandering to the
silliest barking moonbats on the fringe of the Democratic left. Bush
has actually gained stature by comparison after every debate.

Nobody expects these guys to sound like Republicans — but, you know,
once, there used to be a Democratic position that didn’t sound like
a petulant “Nyah, nyahhh”. I haven’t heard any credible plan for the
war or the economy. Clue: Neither “Repeal the Bush tax cuts” or “Hand
Iraq to the U.N. and the French” will fly to anyone who can string
three facts together about economics or history. I don’t think these
characters even believe their own bullshit.

You Republicans out there will be comforted by the thought
that the Democrats are utterly incapable of taking this advice. I amnot comforted by that thought — but you’re probably
right.

(Correction: a reader pointed out that in 2003 the U.S. is
the third most populous country in the world, not the
fourth.)

VodkaPundit asks: Is the Democratic Party becoming increasingly
likely to pull a Whig Maneuver and disappear into history? If so, what
replaces it?

The Democrats certainly seem to be trying pretty hard to
self-destruct. But this is not a new story; it’s been going on ever
since the New Left captured the party apparat in the early 1970s. My
first experience of political activism was standing athwart that
particular tide of history, yelling “stop!”, as a campaign worker for
centrist Democrat Scoop Jackson in 1975. I think I already
half-understood that he was doomed. What I didn’t foresee was the
completeness with which the Democrats would abandon their southern and
rural wings to become a party run exclusively by Brie-nibbling urban
elites. Call it the NPRization of the party.

Recently they’ve abandoned the private-sector labor unions as well.
Just before 2000, a key Democratic strategist noted that party’s
demographic power base consisted solely of blacks and the
public-employee unions. Bill Clinton, charming sociopath and perfect
acme of the American political creature that he was, had managed to
paper over that problem for a while. But it keeps getting worse. The
liberal-Democrat lock on the national media is crumbling under
pressure from talk radio, Fox News, and the bloggers. They’re losing
their ability to control the terms of political debate.

Finally, there is the notorious fractiousness of the smaller
Democratic interest groups. While the black establishment has largely
settled into the role of party wheelhorse and the trial lawyers play
financial sugar daddy without demanding much except a complete block on
tort reform, feminists and gays and the hard left continue to cause
the party problems out of all proportion to their voting strength. The
structural problem is that the small factions are disproprtionately
strong in the Democrats’ grass-roots organization; they therefore
exert a big influence on party primaries and tend to pull the
candidate list and the platform to the left.

Ever since the early 1990s, there’s been a tug-of-war going on
within the urban elites that now run the party; the Democratic
Leadership Council versus the inheritors of the New Left. What’s
happening now with the Dean campaign demonstrates that the DLC has
lost its grip. The left is winning. The trend that has taken the
Democrats from solid majority status in my childhood to the point
where it needs a Bill Clinton to win elections, if it continues, might
very well result in it disappearing into history.

The DLC’s most recent effort to reverse this tend — to stop
talking about gun control — only highlights the depth of the
problem. They know, because their own analysts and Bill Clinton have
told them, that gun owners are the swing vote that cost them the 1994
and 2000 elections. And yet, the left, for whom hatred of civilian
firearms is a religious absolute, has such a lock on the party machine
that the DLC can only talk about spin, not about a substantive change
in platform.

I expect the Democrats to lose heavily in today’s elections.
Like VodkaPundit, I expect the loss to change not a damn thing. The
DLC will continue to wring its hands, and the New Lefties, comforted
by convenient rationalizations in the major media, will continue to
march the Democratic Party towards a cliff’s edge.

Suppose they do succeed in self-destructing. What then?

No crystal ball is required to answer that question, just a look at
the minor-party voting statistics. If the Democrats crumble, the big
winners have to be the Greens and the Libertarians. The New Lefties
who run most levels of the modern Democratic apparat would run to the
Greens en masse; in fact, whatever organization emerges would probably
view itself (with some justification) as the Democratic Party’s
successor. They’d probably take the public-employee unions with them.

The interesting question is whether the black establishment would
follow. Blacks, as a voting group, are more conservative on social
issues than Democrats as a whole — heavily opposed to gay marriage,
for example, and more in favor of school vouchers. The strain between
general opinion among blacks and the strident leftism of many of their
public figures has been growing. If the party of Lyndon Johnson were
to disintegrate, it would become acute. I think the most likely
scenario is that the Al Sharptons. Cynthia McKinneys and Carol
Moseley-Brauns would run to the Greens, lose their popular base,
and the black vote would fragment. Blacks would become a normal
ethnic group, not tied to any one party.

The second-order effects on the Republicans would be just as
interesting. The youth demographic Andrew Sullivan and others call
“South Park Republicans” would bolt the GOP in a second if the
Libertarians looked like a credible alternative. So, albeit more
slowly and partially, would more traditional (and older)
small-government/classical-liberal/free-trade types. The big
question, given current pressures, is whether the Libs would remain
isolationist or reluctantly slide into the pro-war camp and start
behaving a bit more like a European party of the center or
center-right.

In either scenario, the effect on the Republicans would be to
resove their split-personality problem in favor of cultural
conservatives and the hard right. They’d become a lot more like a
Tory party. The really entertaining part comes when you look at how
this change would tie in with regional demographics — in this future,
the Republicans would become the party of the old South!